The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  No, he told himself firmly. Some curiosity doesn’t need to be satisfied. That went dead against everything he’d ever believed. He tried to convince himself of it anyway.

  Here was the Stura. Grus had spent a lot of years traveling up and down the river in a war galley. Now he approached it on horseback. The sour smell of old smoke filled his nostrils. This was the valley the Menteshe had overrun most thoroughly. That meant it was the valley where Prince Ulash’s men had done the most damage.

  Seeing that damage both infuriated and depressed the king. “How am I supposed to set this to rights?” he demanded of Hirundo.

  “Driving the Menteshe back over the river would be a good start,” the general answered.

  Hirundo smiled. He joked. But that was kidding on the square. Unless the Avornans could drive the Menteshe south of the Stura once more, Grus had exactly no chance of setting any of this to rights. And here, where their countrymen could slip north over the river in small boats by night, where the Menteshe could also bring river galleys—some of them rowed by brainless thralls—into the fight, driving them out of Avornis was liable to prove doubly hard.

  “We can do it,” Hirundo said. “They don’t want to fight a stand-up battle. Whenever they try that, they lose, and they know it.”

  “They don’t need to make a stand-up fight,” Grus said darkly. “All they need to do is keep riding around and burning things. What kind of harvest will anyone here in this valley have? None to speak of, and we both know it. The Menteshe know it, too. Wrecking things works as well for them as winning battles.” He waved toward what had been a vineyard. “No one will grow grapes here for years. No grapes, no wine, no raisins. It’s the same with olive groves. Cut the trees down and burn them and it’s years before you have olives and olive oil again. What do people do in the meantime?”

  “I’ll tell you what they do,” Hirundo answered. “They do without.”

  Another joke that held entirely too much truth. The trouble was that people couldn’t very well do without wine and raisins and grapes and olive oil. Here in the south, those things were almost as important as wheat and barley—not that the grainfields hadn’t been ravaged, too. A good harvest next year would go a long way toward putting that worry behind people … provided they didn’t starve in the meantime. But the other crops would take longer to recover.

  “And what happens if the Menteshe swarm over the Stura again next spring?” Grus demanded.

  “We try to hit them before they can cause anywhere near this much mischief,” Hirundo answered reasonably.

  “But can we really do it? Wouldn’t you rather go up into the Chernagor country and finish what we’ve been trying to do there for years now? And what about the Chernagor pirates? What if they hit our east coast again next spring while the Menteshe cross the Stura?”

  “You’re full of cheerful ideas,” Hirundo said.

  “It could have happened this year,” Grus said. “We’re lucky it didn’t.”

  Hirundo shook his head. “That isn’t just luck, Your Majesty. True, you didn’t take Nishevatz, but you came close, and you would have done it, odds are, if the war down here hadn’t drawn you away. And our ships gave the Chernagor pirates all they wanted, and more besides. It’s no wonder they didn’t move along with the cursed Menteshe. You put the fear of the gods in them.”

  “The fear of the gods,” Grus murmured. He hoped some of the Chernagors still felt it, as opposed to the fear of the Banished One. But what he hoped and what was true were liable to be two different things, as he knew too well. Confusing the one with the other could only lead to disappointment.

  As he was getting ready to lie down on his cot that evening, Alauda said, “Ask you something, Your Majesty?”

  Grus looked at her in surprise. She didn’t ask a lot of questions. “Go ahead,” the king said after a moment. “You can always ask. I don’t know that I’ll answer.”

  The peasant girl’s smile was wry. “I understand. You don’t have to, not for the likes of me. But when we were up in Pelagonia … You had another woman up there, didn’t you?”

  “Not another woman I slept with,” Grus said carefully. He’d had enough rows with women (that a lot of those rows were his own fault never crossed his mind). He didn’t want another one now. If he had to send Alauda somewhere far away to keep from having another one, he was ruthlessly ready to do that.

  But she only shrugged. “Another woman you care about, I mean. I don’t know if you slept with her or not.” She waited. Grus gave her a cautious nod. She went on, “And you’d cared about her for a while now,” and waited again. Again, the king nodded. Now he waited. Alauda licked her lips and then asked, “Why didn’t you just throw me over for her, then?” That was what she’d really wanted to know all along.

  I intended to. But Grus didn’t say that. He got in trouble over women because he took them to bed whenever he got the chance, not because he was wantonly cruel. What he did say was, “We aren’t lovers anymore. We used to be, but we aren’t.”

  Alauda surprised him again, this time by laughing. “When we got there, you thought you were going to be, though, didn’t you?”

  “Well … yes,” he said in dull embarrassment. He hadn’t thought she’d noticed that. Now he asked a question of his own. “Why didn’t you bring up any of this when we were there?”

  She laughed once more, on a self-deprecating note. “What good would it have done me? None I could see. Safer now, when I’m here and she’s not.”

  She did have her share of shrewdness. Grus had seen that before. “Now you know,” he said, although he’d told her as little as he could. He changed the subject, asking, “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m all right,” she answered. “I’m supposed to have babies. I’m made for it. It’s not always comfortable—about half the time, breakfast doesn’t want to stay down—but I’m all right. Is the war going as well as it looks?”

  “Almost,” Grus said. “We’re still going forward, anyhow. I hope we’ll keep on doing it.”

  “Once we chase all the Menteshe out of Avornis, how do we keep them out for good?” Alauda asked.

  “I don’t know,” Grus said, which made her blink. He went on, “Avornans have been trying to find the answer to that for a long time, but we haven’t done it yet. If we had, they wouldn’t be in Avornis now, would they?” He waited for Alauda to shake her head, then added, “One thing I can do—one thing I will do—is put more river galleys on the Stura. That will make it harder for them to cross, anyhow.”

  She nodded. “That makes good sense. Why weren’t there more river galleys on the Stura before?”

  “They’re expensive,” he answered. “Expensive to build, even more expensive to man.” The tall-masted ships that aped the ones the Chernagor pirates made cost more to build. River galleys, with their large crews of rowers, cost more to maintain. And every man who became a sailor was one more man who couldn’t till the soil. After the disasters of this war, Avornis was liable to need farmers even more desperately than she needed soldiers or sailors. The king hoped she could find enough. If not, lean times were coming, in the most literal sense of the words.

  Lanius liked coming into the kitchens. He nodded to the head cook, a rotund man named Cucullatus. “Tomorrow is Queen Sosia’s birthday, you know,” he said. “Do up something special for her.”

  Cucullatus’ smile was almost as wide as he was, which said a good deal. “How about a kidney pie, Your Majesty? That’s one of her favorites.”

  “Fine.” Lanius hoped his own smile was also wide and seemed sincere. Sosia did love kidney pie, or any other dish with kidneys in it. Lanius didn’t. To him, cooked kidneys smelled nasty. But he did want to make his wife happy. He worked harder to keep Sosia happy since he’d started taking lovers among the serving women than he had before. He thought himself unique in that regard, which only proved he didn’t know everything there was to know about straying husbands.

  “We’ll take care of it, You
r Majesty,” Cucullatus promised. “And whatever kidneys don’t go into the pie, we’ll save for the moncats.”

  “Fine,” Lanius said again, this time with real enthusiasm. The moncats loved kidneys, which didn’t stink nearly as much raw.

  The king started to leave the kitchens. A startled noise from one of the sweepers made him turn back. There was Pouncer, clinging to a beam with one clawed hand. The moncat’s other hand clutched a big wooden spoon. Reading moncats’ expressions was a risky game, but Lanius thought Pouncer looked almost indecently pleased with itself.

  “Come back here! Come down here!” the king called in stern tones. But Pouncer was no better at doing what it was told than any other moncat—or any other cat of any sort.

  Cucullatus said, “Here, don’t worry, Your Majesty. We can lure it down with a bit of meat.”

  “Good idea,” Lanius said. But the sweeper who’d first spotted Pouncer wasn’t paying any attention to either Cucullatus or the king. He tried to knock the moncat from the beam with his broom. He missed. Pouncer yowled and swung up onto the beam, with only its tail hanging down. The sweeper sprang, trying to grab the tail. He jumped just high enough to pull out a few of the hairs at the very end. Pouncer yowled again, louder this time, and took off like a dart hurled from a catapult.

  “You stupid, manure-brained idiot!” Cucullatus bawled at the poor sweeper. Then he turned on the rest of the men and women in the kitchens. “Well? Don’t just stand there, you fools! Catch the miserable little beast!”

  If that wasn’t a recipe for chaos, Lanius couldn’t have come up with one. People bumped into one another, tripped one another, and cursed one another with more passion than Lanius had ever heard from them. Several of them carried knives, and more knives, long-tined forks, and other instruments of mayhem lay right at hand. Why they didn’t start stabbing one another was beyond the king.

  After a couple of minutes of screaming anarchy, somebody asked, “Where did the stinking creature go?”

  Lanius looked around. So did the kitchen staff, pausing in their efforts to tear the place down. “Where did the stinking creature go?” somebody else said.

  Pouncer had disappeared. A wizard couldn’t have done a neater job of making the moncat disappear.

  However he got in here, that’s the way he must have gone, Lanius thought. Unlike the kitchen staff, he had, or believed he had, a pretty good idea of where the moncat would go next. He pointed to Cucullatus. “Give me two or three strips of raw meat.”

  “But the moncat is gone, Your Majesty,” Cucullatus said reasonably.

  “I know that. I’ll eat them myself,” Lanius said. Cucullatus stared. “Never mind what I want with them,” the king told him. “Just give them to me.”

  He got them. Servants gaped to see him hurrying through the palace corridors with strips of raw, dripping beef in his hand. A couple of them even worked up the nerve to ask him what he was doing. He didn’t answer. He just kept on, not quite trotting, until he got to the archives.

  When he closed the heavy doors behind him, he let out a sigh of relief. No more bellowing cooks, no more nosy servants. Only peace, quiet, dust motes dancing in sunbeams, and the soothing smell of old parchment. This was where he belonged, where no one would come and bother him.

  Even as he pulled some documents—tax registers, he saw they were—from the shelf of a cabinet that had known better centuries, he was shaking his head. Today, he hoped he would be bothered. If he wasn’t … If he wasn’t, Pouncer had decided to go back to the moncats’ chamber instead. Or maybe the perverse beast would simply wander through whatever secret ways it had found until it decided to come out in the kitchens again.

  Lanius looked at the registers with one eye while looking all around the archives chamber with the other. He didn’t know where Pouncer would appear. Actually, he didn’t know whether Pouncer would appear at all, but he did his best to forget about that. He did know this was the best bet he could make.

  And it paid off. Just when he’d gotten engrossed in one of the registers in spite of himself, a faint, rusty, “Mrowr?” came from behind a crate that probably hadn’t been opened in at least two hundred years.

  “Come here, Pouncer!” Lanius called, and then he made the special little chirping noise that meant he had a treat for the moncat.

  Out Pouncer came. The moncat still clutched the spoon it had stolen. Even the spoon paled in importance, though, before the lure of raw meat. “Mrowr,” Pouncer said again, this time on a more insistent note.

  “Come on,” Lanius coaxed, holding a strip of beef where the moncat could see—and smell—it. “Come on, you fuzzy moron. You know you want this.”

  Want it Pouncer did. Sidling forward, the moncat reached out with a clawed hand. Lanius gave it the first piece of meat. The moncat ate quickly, fearful of being robbed even though none of its fellows were near. In some ways it was very much like a man. Once the meat had disappeared, Pouncer held out that little hand and said, “Mrowr,” yet again.

  Give me some more, or you’ll be sorry. Lanius had no trouble translating that particular meow into Avornan. The king gave the moncat another piece of meat. This one vanished more slowly. As it did, Pouncer began to purr. Lanius had been waiting for that. It was a sign he could pick up the moncat without getting his hand shredded. He did. Pouncer kept on purring.

  Feeling more than a little triumphant, Lanius carried the moncat—and the serving spoon it had stolen—out of the royal archives. The tax registers he left where they were. They dated from the early years of his father’s reign. No one had looked at them since; Lanius was sure of that. They weren’t going anywhere for the time being. And one of these days he would have to have a peek inside that crate Pouncer had been hiding behind.

  Pouncer started twisting in the king’s arms and trying to get free before Lanius reached the moncats’ chamber. Lanius still had one strip of meat left. He offered it to the moncat, and bought just enough contentment to keep from getting clawed the rest of the way there. Pouncer even let him take away the wooden spoon.

  Cucullatus clapped his hands when Lanius brought the spoon back to the kitchens. “Well done, Your Majesty!” he said, as though Lanius had just captured Yozgat and reclaimed the Scepter of Mercy.

  “Thank you so much,” Lanius said.

  “Kidney pie,” Cucullatus went on, ignoring or more likely not noticing the king’s irony. Lanius frowned; the commotion with the moncat had almost made him forget why he’d come to the kitchens in the first place. The chief cook went on, “Her Majesty will enjoy it. You wait and see.”

  “Ah.” Lanius nodded. “Yes, I hope she does.”

  Sosia did. When she sat down to supper on her birthday, she smiled and wagged a finger at Lanius. “Somebody’s been talking to the kitchens,” she said as a servant gave her a big helping of the pungent dish.

  “Why would anyone talk to a kitchen?” Lanius asked. “Ovens and pots and skewers don’t listen very well.”

  His wife gave him a severe look. “You know what I mean,” she said. “You’ve been talking to the people who work in the kitchens. There. Are you happier?”

  “I couldn’t be happier, not while I’ve got you,” Lanius answered.

  Sosia smiled. “That’s sweet,” she said. But then the smile slipped. “In that case, why—?” She stopped and shook her head. “No, never mind. Not tonight.”

  Lanius had no trouble figuring out what she’d started to say. In that case, why did you take Cristata to bed? Why did you want to make her your second wife? To Lanius, it made good enough sense. He hadn’t been unhappy with Sosia. He’d just wanted to be happy with Cristata, too. He still didn’t see anything wrong with that. Grus’ daughter, however, had a decidedly different opinion.

  And what about Zenaida? Lanius asked himself. He knew what Sosia’s opinion of her would be. He didn’t think he was in love with her, the way he had with Cristata. Maybe seeing that he didn’t would keep Sosia from getting so furious this time. On the other h
and, maybe it wouldn’t do him any good at all. She’d better not find out about Zenaida, the king thought.

  He smiled at Sosia. “Happy birthday,” he told her.

  “You’re even eating the kidney pie yourself,” she said in some surprise.

  And so Lanius was. His thoughts full of maidservants, he’d hardly noticed he was doing it. Now that he did notice, he was reminded again that this was not his favorite dish—too strong for his taste. Still, he shrugged and answered, “I don’t hate it,” which was true. As though to prove it, he took another bite. What he did prove, to himself, was that he didn’t love it, either.

  “I’m glad,” Sosia said.

  Later that evening, Lanius made love with his wife. He didn’t hate that, either. If Zenaida was a little more exciting … well, maybe that was because she wasn’t as familiar as Sosia—and maybe, also, because the thrill of the illicit added spice to what they did. Nothing illicit about Sosia, but nothing wrong with her, nothing that made him want to sleep apart. He did his best to please her when they joined.

  By the way she responded, his best proved good enough. “You are sweet,” she said, as though reminding herself.

  “I think the same thing—about you,” he added hastily, before she could tease him about thinking himself sweet. That was what he got for being precise most of the time.

  He waited there in the darkness, wondering if Sosia would ask why he’d gone after Cristata if he thought she was sweet. But she didn’t. She just murmured, “Well, good,” rolled over on her side, and fell asleep. Lanius rolled over, too, in the opposite direction. His backside bumped hers. She stirred a little, but kept on breathing slowly and deeply. A few minutes later, Lanius also drifted off, a smile on his face.

  A lieutenant from one of the river galleys on the Stura stood before King Grus. “Your Majesty, an awful lot of the Menteshe are sneaking south across the river. More and more every day, and especially every night. We’ve sunk half a dozen boats full of the stinking buggers, and more have gotten by us.”